In September when we were in New York, I was sitting in a soft chair in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel one afternoon, and a tourist came along and sat down almost beside me.

I say almost because he left an empty chair between us. Lots of chairs were in that lobby. Sitting close that way meant he wanted to talk.

How did I know he was a tourist? Any second-grader could tell, because the fellow wore Bermuda shorts and a red shirt and new sneakers. And a baseball cap.

"You look comfortable." That was his opener. I said I was, pretty much.

I knew his next question would be, "Where you from?" And the one after that would be, "What do you do?"

The truth is, I wasn't interested in talking because I'd been sitting there inside a soft thought-cloud. Sometimes, I can have a nice time being alone and thinking about pleasant things, and I get a little grumpy if disturbed.

But then a person ought not to expect solitude when he's loafing in one of the greatest population centers of the world.

"Where you from?" the tourist asked.

When I'm a long way from home and get that question, I seldom answer "Texas." Instead, I say "Houston," because I'm interested in how people in other parts of the world respond when they hear the name of our city.

Almost always they mention heat and humidity. My tourist friend there in the hotel lobby had once spent two days in Houston, when he delivered a relative to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. From those days he recalled two things - heat and humidity.

I doubt he'd believe that on the day we talked, in September, the weather was cooler in Houston than in New York City.

Right on schedule, he asked the question about what I do, meaning what I do for a living. Told him I worked for a newspaper. He said he did, too, at one time. Started out that way, delivering papers.

This didn't surprise me. The world is full of people who used to work for newspapers. Politicians, for instance. I never met one who didn't have a paper route when he was a kid, and got up at 4 a.m., seven days a week.

In conversations of this kind, sometimes I go ahead and leave the impression that I sell subscriptions or deliver papers. Because if I say I'm a columnist, I have to defend myself for not being a sports columnist. My experience suggests that most people in this country think if you're a newspaper columnist, you ought to write about sports.

And I would never, ever, mention that I've written a book, because then I'm hit with the question, "What's it about?"

And there's no way to summarize an entire book in one sentence without making it sound like something nobody would ever want to touch, much less buy, and read.

If I'm trapped and forced, I say that all my books are about sex and violence in small towns, and that generally brings about a change of topic in a conversation.

After my new friend in the hotel lobby learned that I manage to survive here in the heat and humidity of Houston, he didn't ask if I lived on a ranch. A traveling Texan often gets that question.

When I get it, I say yes, that we own a ranch in Washington County. I don't say that it consists of only 10 acres. If strangers ask what we raise, I say fire ants and grasshoppers and they laugh and let the matter drop. But they might be impressed if they knew how many fire ants and grasshoppers you can raise on 10 acres.

This small oddity now strikes me: I spent 10 days in New York City and nobody - not even my tourist friend in the lobby - asked me about oil wells or Indians. Could it be, at last, that the public image of Texas is changing?

As recently as the 1950s, a Texan didn't have to travel any farther north than Ohio before he'd be asked if it were true - did he really have an oil well in his backyard?

If they've quit asking that, I'm a little disappointed. Because after decades of denying that I have nothing to do with oil wells, finally I do. Our 10 acres at Winedale is in an 800-acre production unit, and every three months we get an oil check for something like $19.38.